Trail Bay 27DS

Home again. A great trip!

[This entry was edited by dlgps on Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 10:53:33 AM.]

[This entry was edited by dlgps on Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 10:54:07 AM.]

Discovered outside the front door when the TB owner stopped by to visit our cache "X Marks the Spot" (GC157W8) in De Soto, IA. Nice to meet you!

Spent last night in site #59 at Elk Rock State Park. Denny found a cache in the park this morning and we found one more in Winterset's town square in the evening. Just a two cache day. Yesterday we drove here from Marr Park near Washington, Iowa. Had planned to maybe stay at Lake Darling State Park but with the lake drained and not much upkeep we thought we would move on. Unfortunately when we got here to Elk Rock we found that the upkeep had been better at Lake Darling!!! We set up camp and turned on the A/C as it was pretty humid. Had some lunch and then went for a ride "around the lake". The lake, really the Red Rock Reservoir, is huge! We drove clear around to the east where the dam is and back up around again and then cross-country to the state park entrance. We also made several stops to look at the low level of the lake, the road that is now at the bottom of the lake, and several Corp of Engineer waysides and campgrounds. Back to the camper for the evening then Denny got up in this morning and found the correct route to the Giddy Up cache here in the park. Then we packed up and headed west again to Winterset in Madison County for our final two nights of our camping/geocaching vacation.

Left Wildcat Den State Park around 11:00 AM yesterday. Set up in site #4 at Marr Park and had a light lunch and then snoozed and read the afternoon away. There was a perfect breeze blowing through the camper! Marr Park is sure a great county park and campground with water and electricity. The kind of campground it would be fun to come back to someday. Wonderful Nature Center as well. We toured that for a bit before we headed into Washington where after a stop at Wal-Mart to redeem some cans and bottles, Dena spent some time in the local library logging trackables and Denny walked around town a bit after using his i-touch and the library's wi-fi. Dena also found a newer multi-cache in town on the geocaching.com website so we found that quickly (our only find of the day) and then zoomed back to the camper to watch another episode of Big Brother while fixing and eating supper.

This morning we got up and found the two caches here in the park before we headed down the road again heading straight west towards Lake Darling State Park and beyond. Managed to time it so we hit the China Buffet on the west side of Washington's town square for lunch just as they started serving. Boy, was that good!

Found just two caches yesterday. The Maze Exhibit which gave us a BRAND NEW CACHE ICON and a regular cache outside the museum. Didn't find this cache or any others nearby so just used this cache for a mileage dip. After church, we had Sunday Dinner at a local Chinese/Thai 'dive' then went to the GPS at the Putnam Science Museum in Davenport. It was fun. Then we headed out of town once again following the Mississippi towards Wildcat Den State Park for a night of boondock camping in site #26. Had a bit of a scare when the trailer came off the ball. We hadn't put the blocks around the tires and the trailer rolled back about a foot! First time in seven years that that has happened! Even worse was there wasn't any pad or concrete curb at the back of the campsite...just grass so if it would have started rolling it wouldn't have stopped until it hit the trees about 100 yards behind us! But all turned out ok.

After setting up camp we drove around the State Park and surrounding area, toured the Grist Mill, drove down to the Fairpoint SRA and Shady Creek Campground (a Corp of Eng Campground - very, very nice!!!) Came back for supper, Big Brother, and a campfire. After s'mores we watched the stars for a while and saw several falling stars. Found out later that we caught the tailend of a meteor shower that had peaked earlier. (Perseids?)

The next morning we were up kind of early and drove back down to the other side of the park to see the Wildcat Den and the memorial marker for the sisters that donated the land that the park sits on.